Ben Gibbard famous quotes

I don't want to be overdramatic about it, but I'm starting to see a lot of my bad habits get the best of me.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Want #Habit #Starting

At this point in my life, I find myself obsessed with alternate paths I could've taken. I don't think about this with a sense of regret, but with a sense of wonder...
-- Ben Gibbard

#Regret #Taken #Thinking

To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Records #God Knows

An ex-girlfriend once got upset when I told her that music is the most important thing in my life. It's more important than anyone else could ever be. I don't want to be overly dramatic and say it's the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go. As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I've always been able to rely on.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Girlfriend #People #Upset

Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Interesting #Interesting Things

I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun. I hit 70 one time on a radar guy at one of those pitch-and-throw kind of things. I have a pretty good arm for somebody who's not a baseball player.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Baseball #Gun #Player

Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Song #Musical #Groups

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Writing #Self #Long

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Prayer #Father #Tiny

I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn't get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don't even want.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Jobs #Finding Yourself #Want

I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Writing #Piano #Lines

I feel like there's a lot of beauty in the darkness of Narrow Stairs, but that's not really a place I'm ready to go to for a while. I'm interested in taking a different approach and having the next record be different in tone - I'm just not interested in making another dark, dark album.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Dark #Different #Albums

If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Book #Writing #People

Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I've spent away from my family and loved ones, I'm starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There's a darkness inside of me that I'm only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it's starting to scare me.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Fun #Darkness #Age

A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don't feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Disappointment #Moving #People

Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can't stand us, and people who absolutely can't live without us. I'd rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Opposites #People #Feelings

I don't spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself - and if other people like it, that's great.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Song #Thinking #People

For me, a song doesn't really take flight until it has a lyric on it. ...Without a lyric that I'm happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn't have any resonance.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Wise #Song #Writing

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It's a language aside from the language they have with strangers. I've always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I've always loved it and I like how those words sound together.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Girlfriend #Wife #Together

The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Song #Clever #Keys

The second 'Postal Service' album is threatening to become the 'Chinese Democracy' of indie rock. It will come out eventually, or maybe it won't.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Rocks #Chinese #Democracy

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.
-- Ben Gibbard

#World #Kind #Feels

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Writing

You can't please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Thinking #Self #Healthy

More times than not, it's a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Writing #Thinking #Needs

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Song #Writing #Want

I just rediscovered my guitar.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Guitar

I've always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He's a great vocalist.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Spots #Vocalist

I've covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don't think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Song #Thinking #Kind

I'm a war of head versus heart, it's always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Love #War #Heart